Sportscasting Fraternity Ignored Abuse By O.J. Simpson
His friends in the media all said they were shocked.
Sportscaster Al Michaels of ABC: "This is bizarre, almost incomprehensible."
Sportscaster Jim Lampley of NBC: "I love O.J. I'm 100 percent confident he won't be charged."
Veteran producer Terry O'Neil: "In a million years, I will never believe O.J. had anything to do with this."
O.J. Simpson was everybody's favorite member of the sport's TV fraternity.
As Will McDonough, the NBC football analyst, told USA Today: "At NBC, if you took a vote on the most popular guy, O.J. would win by a landslide."
Knew about past
Which is strange, when you think about it, because the people at NBC knew that O.J. Simpson had admitted beating his wife. So did the rest of his friends.
They knew about New Year's Day in 1989, when a frantic Nicole Simpson telephoned the police to say she was afraid that he was going to kill her.
They knew that the beating that night left her with a cut lip, a swollen black eye, a bruised cheek and a handprint on her neck.
They knew that Simpson had pleaded no contest, and agreed to pay a fine and perform community service.
But they evidently swallowed Simpson's explanation, as offered to ESPN's Roy Firestone: "We had a fight. We were both guilty. No one was hurt. It was no big deal, and we got on with our lives."
No big deal.
That's the way many in the sports media look at the crime of wife abuse.
NBC Sports certainly didn't treat it as a big deal when charges of spousal battery were brought against Simpson. The network signed him to a new contract three months later.
The Los Angeles Times, his hometown paper, didn't treat the charges as a big deal, either. The paper covered the story with a nine-paragraph wire report inside the sports section and a five-paragraph "Metro Brief" when Simpson pleaded no contest.
Media turned heads
Nationally, the sports media turned away. The wife-abuse charges against Simpson did not get nearly the attention given to Michael Jordan's gambling, Darryl Strawberry's drug use, Mickey Mantle's drinking or even Wilt Chamberlain's boasts about his promiscuity.
Even Hertz, which made Simpson its corporate spokesman, dismissed the incident. "We regard it as a private matter to be treated as such between O.J.'s wife and the courts," Joe Russo, a Hertz vice president, said in May 1989.
No big deal.
Indeed, Simpson said afterward that people's reaction to the charges against him had been "so supportive that it was unbelievable."
This certainly tells us something about Simpson and his charms. I interviewed him in the late 1980s when doing a book about ABC's "Monday Night Football," and found him to be immensely likable. Others who worked for ABC Sports had only kind words to say about Simpson, and so no one wanted to believe that he was capable of violence.
"Because he was O.J., because he was everybody's hero, he was allowed to slide," Dick Schaap, who's seen on both ABC and ESPN, said this week.
Forget or forgive
But the sports media reaction to Simpson's woes, then and now, also reveals an unexpected willingness among many to forget or forgive the crime of wife abuse.
As veteran sportswriter Frank Deford told the Washington Post: "He got a pass, more or less, when the business came out about his wife-beating. It rolled off his back. Maybe because the sports fraternity is so male, you can escape being tarnished in matters like that."
Consider, after all, how you'd react if someone who works across the room from you were charged with wife-beating.
Would you still consider him a nice guy? Would he still be voted the most popular guy in the office?
The murder of Nicole Simpson has prompted much commentary recently about how we never really know people like Simpson who seem so familiar to us on television. "Television's false intimacy," one critic called it.
The lesson here, though, is just the opposite.
Friends and colleagues of Simpson's, including many in the sports media, knew plenty about him.
They just chose to ignore it - or to dismiss it as no big deal.